


Possession

by foundCarcosa



Category: Fable (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-07 00:09:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/424718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of psychotic!Reaver, and Saturnyn's answer to Reaver/fem!Sparrow fluffiness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She didn’t know how she’d gotten here, and that was the worst part.

A monarchy, they’d said — the strapping lad named Beck, and Bowerstone’s town crier, and the butler of the castle she’d just purchased. The butler who was more than what he seemed, just like nearly everything in the castle.  
They wanted a monarchy. They wanted _her_ to wear the royal garb.

And Reaver… well, Reaver had come back to congratulate her.

 _Remember him,_ her brain whispered, a traitor like none other. _Remember how he made you feel, once._

The tailor had been pleased to fit her for a gown, the adventurer who’d so often trotted into his shop in rags and left looking not too much better. He’d asked after the occasion, and she’d been unable to tell him.  
No one spoke Reaver’s name outside of Bloodstone.

And now she was _in_ Bloodstone, a chill in the air that _could_ have been autumn encroaching and _could_ have been the ghost of a banshee’s scream from nearby Wraithmarsh, and Reaver’s manor was ablaze with light and laughter and the too-sweet smell of port and claret.

“This is your party, my dear,” he’d spoken, merely a chuckling murmur in her ear before she’d spun around to face him. “All yours…”

She hadn’t asked why he’d come all the way back here, to the seat of his crumbling rule, simply to throw _her_ a party.  
She had stared at him, eyes narrow enough to be intimidating but wide enough to devour him, and let herself believe. And when he pressed the glass into her hand, she hadn’t pressed it back upon him.

She’d drunk, and drunk deeply, and when her head became too full of music and prattle and revelry, she’d made her way to a divan and took a seat.

Or, so she’d thought.

—

_“‘M sorry, missus, so very sorry, y’ know. But when Master tells you to do something…”_

_“…What do y’ want we should do with the dress, Master Reaver?”_

_“Pretty lass… pretty, pretty lass… oh, Master won’t hurt me if I just touch a little, will he…?”_

_“You think she’ll wake up soon? …You think she’ll fight? She looks like a fighter, just the old man’s type, y’ know…”_

_“…Pretty, pretty lass… all dressed up, all for Master.  
Pretty…”_

—

She is on land, but she has sea legs.

She shoves herself to a sitting position, and as soon as the vertigo fades she’s on her feet, hands going for a blade, some hidden dagger in the corset-top she’s not wearing, in the boots she’s not wearing, in the…

…Bleary eyes try to snap to focus, dart around the room, but not a stitch of clothing to be found, and she recognises this bedspread from which she’s propelled herself — rich red damask, rich like blood, and embroidered in the very pattern itself is his hateful initial, that curlicued letter “R”.

“You missed a wonderful party, my dear.” The world spins when she wheels around, but the resultant stumble and reel doesn’t keep her from seeing him — the untameable swath of hair that sweeps up from his forehead, the dry smirk on pouting lips, the slight curve of his side as he leans against the doorframe. He brings cold with him. Nude save for her tumbling hair, like the First Woman in the clearing before Albion was made, she shivers.

“The wine was simply too much for you. I understand. The guests were disappointed that you wouldn’t entertain them, but I made sure you were well taken care of before we departed. Oh, and of _course_ , your parting gifts — all accounted for in the parlour. You can go through them at your leisure later.”  
As he speaks, he floats around the room — moth who holds his own flame, destroyer and destroyed — making sure she has to turn constantly, turn to keep him in her sights, turn to maintain control, control that is slipping away like so many sands through a sieve.

“Parting gifts,” she croaks, and licks her lips with a tongue that feels too full for its mouth.

“All accounted for, as I said. And don’t worry — your clothes will be here soon. I had some last-minute requests for the tailor, slowpoke that he is.” He spins on his heel to face her, hands on hips, eyeing her with something that might have been admiration but also might have been pure greed. “I can’t wait to see you in your garments, love. That frumpy shift you wore to your party… surely you could have done better than that, _surely_.”

He waves his hand dismissively, closing the distance between them — she stumbles backwards, still unsteady, but the wall is there, ready and eager to help her remain upright and within Reaver’s grasp. The pirate touches the edge of her jaw with a single finger, tracing its line towards her chin.  
“Never mind that. I take care of my girls. But you know that, don’t you.”

“Where am I…?”

At this whispered question — she can’t trust her voice, not yet, because the tremor is there, just waiting to be discovered — he arches his eyebrow in something like amusement. His lips brush against hers, and she recoils like a fired rifle.  
“Home.”

—

She regains herself eventually, the drug finally passing out of her system, but it doesn’t matter.

She dresses in Reaver’s clothing — corset and gauze, pencil skirt, is that a _collar_ … — because being nude is a greater indignity.

She tosses her hair and glares down at him when he inspects her, when his hands palm her rear, when he whispers the hated word, “Mine.”  
She is headstrong, but she is intelligent. She bides her time. She waits for the crack in the design, the place where she’ll be able to peer through.

She is no longer in Albion. She knows this now — the air does not smell of peat moss and river water, and the gusts of wind through the gauzy curtains are too hot.  
Wait, she whispers to herself in the deep inky-blue of night, enduring Reaver’s good-night kiss and that serpentine hand slinking under the sheets to squeeze the inside of her thigh.

_He will grow complacent if you only bite your tongue and stay your hand. Wait…_

—

“Mine,” he murmurs, every time he sees her, and his eyes burn like sunglare on the ice at a mountaintop.

“You wound me with these eyes of yours, love. How I’d pluck them out and shove my fingers into their sockets and stab into that brain of yours if I could,” he hisses with the most pleasant of smiles as he saunters past her chair, jiggling the chain of her shackles with a playful flick of his fingers.

“How is it? Good, yes?” he asks, shoving hunks of smoked meat and flaky crust into her mouth, ignoring the tears that leak out of the corners of her eyes. This is the sixth pie. Or the seventh. “You want to go back to Albion, you say. Well, here’s a little slice of your precious _Albion_ …”  
He laughs when it all comes back up, the meat still nearly whole.  
“Ungrateful little cully. Now clean yourself up.”

—

She cannot leave. She knows that now.  
She is far from Albion, far from those who might have come to her defence, and her hands have developed a fine tremor and her eye twitches at the slightest provocation and she is far too prone to hyperventilation to run anymore.

In all her _waiting_ , he broke her, cleanly, like an axe cleaving through dry wood.

But still, she knows not why he is keeping her. Why she never sees the other ‘girls’, those pert lasses that he doles out to the slave market one at a time like precious gems honed in his own forge. Why she has her own room with its own amenities, why she gets three meals a day — sometimes more, sometimes _too_ many more, because sometimes Master Reaver thinks she does not appreciate all she does for her and forces it down her throat — why she gets to go for walks in the courtyard.

She tries to run, once.  
Once.  
When the hounds drag her back, large hunched men in mail with scowls like the honed edge of axes, he stares at her as if she’d slapped him.

“I’ve given you everything,” he hisses, his face a smoothed-out mask of terrible flawlessness. “You want me to hurt you, love? Do you? _Do you?_ ”

Fiery pain in her scalp, the grating scrape of scissor against hair, Master Reaver’s laboured breathing as he alone — not the hounds, not the attendants, but he alone — holds her in place with fist in hair and knee in back.

A sound almost like sobbing as he takes yet one more thing away from his chosen one.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More of the same. Don't expect niceness because we're fresh out of that here.

She isn’t allowed mirrors, and she doesn’t think she could stand one if she were.

But her trembling hands flutter over the exposed nape of her neck, over the ragged edges of her crudely-shorn hair, and she swallows a sob of mourning.

“Oh, my love, I didn’t want to do this,” _he_ murmured afterwards, a broken doll kneeling in the wreckage, lifting tufts of rich auburn hair in his hands and pressing them to his lips. “Look what you’ve… look what you’ve gone and made your Reaver do. _Look_ …”

He might have been crying. He might have been laughing.  
He might have been right.

—

He never touched her, not in that way. Not even once — although his eyes glittered as they drank her in, his tongue touching the tip of his teeth and a low rumble of appreciation barely audible in his throat.

Time passed — days? weeks? …hours? — and the sparks in those eyes flashed brighter and brighter. He kept himself busy with the other girls, with his assets and with his acquisitions, with the rivals whose bodies the hounds carried out in unmarked boxes. He threw elaborate balls to which she found herself invited… and, oh, those balls.

“Dance, love. Dance for them,” he’d whisper, and a tug on her leash would turn into a heeled foot at her neck, and if she didn’t comply he’d drag her to him and crush her face in his ringed hand and grind his knee into her groin until the sharp pain melted into a pleasure she wished she couldn’t feel, and the party would murmur in appreciation of his mastery, and perhaps the dancing — sway of hips, roll of shoulders, a lowly serpent under thrall to the king cobra — would have been less mortifying after all.

But his trousers remained fastened in her presence, even when she stood shivering and exposed before him, even when he drenched her in oil — _dust of sand dragon scale, milk of the poppy, and heaven only knew what other flora and fauna_ — and watched the blood rise to the surface and heat pool in her core, watched her writhe and keen just out of reach, watched her fingers work helplessly between her thighs if only to lessen the agony, if only coming once, coming twice, again, again, would cool the fever and let her sleep…

“Perfection. Bottle it. I want a shipment ready for the Gold Coast by tomorrow morning,” he says, smiling fondly — greedily? — at his precious test subject, and his lackey hurries away with a flush high in his cheeks that wouldn’t abate for the next hour.

Still, he did not touch her.

Soon, she began to wonder why.

—

“How long have you been here?” the girl asks, a hurried whisper as she passes, before Reaver could call for his hound and have the cully dragged back by her tightly-woven braid.

She bursts into bitter tears in response, not just because she doesn’t know, but because she’s stopped caring.

—

She begins to dance _for_ him. Respond _to_ him. Bore her eyes into him until he stares back with eyebrow slightly raised in something like amusement.

 _Look at me,_ she hisses deep within her mind. _You want me to do this, so watch me when I do!_

“I see some of your old fire is returning,” he remarks, swirling brandy in a glass, about to take a sip.  
She snaps her hips and drags her hands over her breasts in response, tossing hair that has already begun to drift over her shoulders again.

He forgets the brandy until the dance is over.

“It’s such a pleasure to see you beginning to enjoy yourself, love,” and that smile of his is almost believable in its brilliance. “I was starting to worry. You’ve been so… _sad_ lately. Your Reaver can’t have that, you know.”

But he sends her back to her room until the morning — “Long night ahead for me, my love” — and she soaks the pillow with bitter, choked tears.

_If you’re going to take me…_

—

 _“…Take all of me,”_ she hisses, the first time she’s spoken since the last time she’d spoken, which was long enough ago that all she can do is rasp hoarsely.

Reaver pauses mid-pace, his hands locked behind his back and his eyes narrow. She was supposed to be silent. A statue functioning as a tray-holder. A centrepiece, something for Reaver to lay his weary eyes upon when he bores of scheming. _Silent._

He ignores her finally, resumes pacing, but he’s already heard, and she knows he’s heard. As he confers with his lackeys, hunching over a tattered-edge map and discussing logistics, she trembles with rage and frustration, and then unshed tears, and finally just trembles.

—

She is sleeping when he comes in the heat of night, reeling-drunk, flushed with madness.

_Take what’s mine…_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's where the red-alert non-con warning comes in. The grand finale of our bloody, sick, sad magnum opus.

When she’d said it, she’d meant it.  
Her fury and her frustration had loosened her tongue, even though she knew she’d pay dearly for it.

If she’d known how dearly, would she have spoken? Would she have ever raised her eyes?

Sleep is her refuge, her home when all concept of home is gone. She tastes the sweet, mineral taste of Alban water. She feels Hammer’s silky-coarse hair in her hands, laughs at Stella’s canine cavorting, watches the constellations slowly wink into existence as the campfire gutters and Garth’s soft snoring becomes mere background noise.  
She dreams, but even this is not restricted to her.

Master Reaver barrels into this shimmering, tenuous other-world, and she’s forgotten what she said, she’s forgotten the simmering rage that lingers just behind his eyes, she’s drunk the nepenthe of dream-land and _forgotten him_.

Oh, now, that wouldn't do.

 _Take what’s mine,_ his liquor-sullied mind whispers like an acid-burn sussurus, and when he touches her cool, supple skin his nerves thrill to life.  
 _Take, and take, and take…_

She stirs to life when his greedy hands grope at the place between her thighs, the place where heat and pulse meet. Her thighs clamp around his wrists. Her breath catches and her eyes bore into him even in this velveteen darkness.

Still, _still_ , she dares not speak.

There’s a mere glint of gemstone eyes in the darkness when he rears up over her, and she opens her mouth to speak ( _to yell, to cry, to merely gasp for air and pray for the end_ ) but there is the cloying scent of wine on his breath and in her nostrils, choking her, bringing water to her eyes. He fumbles at clasps and clutches at fabric, no longer the deft, serpentine pirate, but the mad-eyed and hungry worm.

He pushes into her like a battering ram, and she grits her teeth against the sudden blinding rush — pleasure exploding behind her eyes and in her gut like the first jolt of pain, to the point where she couldn’t be sure exactly _what_ she was feeling. He is uncoordinated and arrhythmic, and it’s easy for the tears to leak out when he clutches at her neck and shoves his tongue down her throat, easy for the body to go limp and submissive when there’s no recourse.

_You wanted me to take you. I am taking you. And I am sick and ugly and dirty and sterile and I rut like a starved man, and this is my truth._

_This is my truth._

—

“You want something from me.”

“I do.”

“If it pleases you… will you tell me what it is?”

“No.”

“…I beg of you… Master Reaver…”

“Children.”

“…But—”

“And I cannot have them. I have been robbed of the chance to... mould a small life into a grand one. So to speak, you understand.”

“But you can’t die. I don’t understand why—”

“The Court is waiting for me to fuck up. Do you understand me, cully? _The Court is **waiting** for me to fuck up!”_

What Master Reaver knows, even the mages do not know — what he would do, even the Court cannot imagine.  
When she knows, she is struck into silence for weeks.

—

There is blood around his mouth when she sees him again.

It is not animal blood.

She has not fainted in years.  
She faints this day.

—

She scrawls it across the walls in her own blood. No one cleans it up.

Diary dear. I saw a ship today.  
It had Alban sails.  
 _It had Alban sails.  
IT HAD ALBAN SAILS_

—

_“Susannah of Bowerstone, also known as Sparrow, also known as Lionheart, also known as the Hero of Bowerstone. Reported missing by a concerned citizen on the second day of Harvest. Was allegedly seen last at a party at Bloodstone Manor, shortly before the house’s former tenant disappeared…”_

_“Missing person found today, the fourth day of Frost-tide, in the port city of Levi, Eastern Samarkand. Suspect apprehended and awaiting trial in Albion.  
Susannah of Bowerstone exhibits signs of considerable physical and mental trauma, as well as possible sexual assault. Early-onset dementia is likely.”_

Susannah of Bowerstone.  
Also known as Sparrow.  
Also known as Lionheart.  
Also known as the Hero of Bowerstone.  
But in the end, Reaver’s precious one, his pearl cully, his.

_His._

—

Heroes are resilient.  
Early-onset dementia, or not, she finds someone patient enough and lonely enough to care for her. They marry. They _fuck_.

A newly rehabilitated Reaver unrolls a tiny scroll and shoos the raven away, bending over the desk to squint at the chicken-scratch handwriting.

_“cully lives. married. pregnant. first child already born. boy.”_

Reaver waits impatiently, hours, days, until the next missive.

_“the boy is named logan.”_

His hands tremble as he crumples the scrap of paper and tosses it into the guttering fireplace, but his adoring, obsessive smile is strong and steady.

_Logan._


End file.
